At the CES 2014, online search engine vendor Yahoo unveiled new products and media sites across smartphones, tablets and the web, as well as new advertising technology.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, in a keynote addressm discussed the company’s vision to make the world’s daily habits inspiring and entertaining.
“We have been hard at work re-imagining Yahoo’s core businesses across search, communications, media and video – all powered by two powerful platforms, Flickr and Tumblr. This fall, for the first time ever, we surpassed 400 million monthly mobile users, which is about half of our 800 million total monthly users,” said Marissa Mayer.
Yahoo Acquires Aviate
Yahoo acquired Aviate, an app solutions provider. Aviate auto-categorizes apps on the Android phone and intelligently gathers them into spaces. By using signals to understand a person’s context – such as WiFi, GPS, Accelerometer, or Time – Aviate surfaces information at the moment it is useful. Aviate learns their digital habits and helps anticipate the information and apps they need.
Yahoo plans to make the Aviate technology a central part of its Android based experiences in 2014 and beyond and will continue to develop the product. Aviate, currently in private beta, is available to the first 25,000 people who download the app in the Google Play store and use code YAHOO.
Yahoo News Digest
Yahoo launched Yahoo News Digest for iPhone and iPod touch, built using insights from Summly. Yahoo News Digest delivers the most important news of the day, twice per day, right to a mobile device.
New Yahoo Food and Yahoo Tech
Yahoo unveiled Yahoo Food and Yahoo Tech. These new digital magazines marry the elegant design and bold imagery of traditional magazines with immersive bite-sized stories, engaging videos, and stunning photos curated from Flickr and across the web.
The new sites are designed with phones and tablets in mind, and feature a fresh design for the computer screen as well, with gorgeous photographic tiles that represent the various stories. When readers click a tile, it smoothly expands in place to the full article; so readers don’t have to deal with browser tabs, multiple windows, or the Back button.
Yahoo Smart TV is the next evolution of Yahoo’s award-winning Connected TV platform already used in millions of households today. Yahoo Smart TV offers interactive viewing with highly personalized program recommendations from TV, Video on Demand, and Web services, along with complementary content related to the show. The Yahoo Smart TV platform is available immediately for integration into televisions, media players and set-top devices. Yahoo Smart TV is currently being demonstrated at CES, powered by Sigma and AmLogic reference platforms.
The New Yahoo Advertising
Yahoo announced its new, unified suite of digital advertising products for premium and audience-focused display, native and search advertising, which are accessible through a new buying platform.
Included in today’s announcement are three new products and platforms:
Yahoo Audience Ads — a better way to buy ads targeted to specific audiences. Yahoo Audience Ads deliver the right messages to the right users across Yahoo and other high-quality sites with the scale and targeting precision of real-time programmatic buying;
Yahoo Ad Manager and Yahoo Ad Manager Plus — a new buying platform that gives advertisers direct, hands-on access to Yahoo’s advertising products;
Yahoo Ad Exchange — a new global ad marketplace that gives premium publishers more visibility and control over advertising on their sites.
Tumblr Sponsored Posts Powered by Yahoo Advertising
The company also announced that Tumblr Sponsored Posts now leverage Yahoo’s technology to offer enhanced targeting, improved optimization and a new way to buy. These features are available among Tumblr’s existing suite of advertiser offerings, which provide brands the ability to share striking, fun creative work that is seamless to the Tumblr experience. Additionally, Tumblr is introducing a cost per engagement (CPE) pricing model, which means that advertisers are only charged for active engagements with their content — Reblogs, Likes, follows or clicks made directly from the sponsored unit itself.
